MANILA, Philippines (Update 1, 5:42 p.m.) — Nearly 53,000 people have been afflicted with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the Philippines after the Department of Health reported 1,233 cases.
The Philippines, which has seen a renewed surge in infections following the easing of quarantine measures nationwide has a total caseload of 52,914. Only Cebu City in Central Visayas remains under the strictest enhanced general community quarantine at least until the end of the month.
The DOH said 848 of the newly-added cases were patients who tested positive for the virus within the last three days, while the other 385 cases were part of the validation backlog.
Forty-seven percent of the fresh cases were from Metro Manila, which entered its second month of general community quarantine. Only 4% of these cases came from Central Visayas, while the remaining 49% were from other regions.
Of the late cases, 36% came from the capital region while only 7% were detected in Central Visayas. The remaining 57% of the late cases were from elsewhere.
Seventy-three duplicates were removed from the total case count.
The department also listed additional 286 COVID-19 survivors, raising the number of recoveries to 13,230.
42 deaths
But 42 more people succumbed to the severe respiratory disease in the Philippines. This pushed the death toll to 1,360.
Of the newly-confirmed deaths, 27 occurred in July and 12 took place in June. Thirty-six of the deaths reported were from Cebu.
The day before, no deaths were reported by the DOH.
“Bagamat mataas ang reported deaths ngayon, thankfully di tayo umaabot sa numbers natin nung March,” Beverly Ho, director of DOH’s Health Promotion and Communication Service
(Although the number reported deaths today was high, thankfully, we did not reach the numbers we had in March.)
The number of active cases stood at 38,324 as of Friday.
The novel coronavirus has killed at least 554,000 since the outbreak emerged in China last December. Over 12.23 million cases of COVID-19 have been registered.
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